I figured it was time to write down some of the tips and tricks I’ve picked up during the first couple of weeks of raiding Cataclysm as a moonkin. I won’t lie, many of these tips probably apply to a lot of ranged classes – heck, maybe all classes – but these are the things I try to remind myself of when we raid.

Bastion of Twilight

Halfus Wyrmbreaker

Apart from the obvious “move out of fire” and “click the lightwell during furious roar”, there are a few tips worth sharing on Halfus. First of all, while you are nuking down a dragon, throw your DOTs on Halfus as well. The damage is not the main point of this, but the shooting stars procs are. I wouldn’t suggest putting DOTs on all dragons (that you have to kill), but keeping them up on Halfus, while nuking down your current drake will give you a nice amount of starsurge spam.

Use typhoon if you are in solar eclipse and have at least two targets that you want to kill. If the Whelps are pulled out, typhoon is your friend, especially if you have Gale Winds – and I don’t see any reason to not have Gale Winds.

Valiona and Theralion

There really aren’t that many tips for this encounter. The only thing I can really suggest, which is only a very minor impact on your DPS, is to not stand near everybody else. Valiona will pick a random target to do her flame breath on, and if 80% of your raid is on one side of the room, staying on the other side will seriously minimize the chances of her trying to roast you. This means you need to move less, and that you can DPS more.

Twilight Ascendants

There is going to be a lot of movement on this fight. Spam your moonfire or sunfire whenever you have to move. In phase 1, avoid standing too close to other people if you can. This is the same principle as with Valiona, if people near you get targeted for a charge, you’ll be hit too. If you can avoid the water attacks, do so – it beats having to run to the fire wall.

In phase 2, simply spam your instants whenever you have to move. And you do have to move – a lot.

Cho’gall

The damage output you do on this fight is not really important. What’s important is where you output it. You’ll have a lot of adds quite a lot of time, and it’s a lot more important to nuke them down when they have to die, than being top on damage to Cho’gall. Do your best to minimize the amount of Corruption you get – a dead moonkin doesn’t do much DPS.

Blackwing Descent

Magmaw

If your guild does this fight in any kind of way like my guild does, you probably have ranged and healers stacked up, moving from side to side. It is a great benefit to your DPS, and your survival, to keep an eye on the timer for Pillar of Flame, and move as soon as you see the graphic pop up. Don’t wait for it to be called out on vent, cause then it will be too late. Getting caught by the pillar means being thrown way up into the air, putting stress on your healers, and putting you at risk of being infected by parasites.

If you are stacking up, you can generally place a few well timed mushrooms before the pillar goes off. When the worms land, blow them up for a bit of nice DPS and maybe a slow. Typhoon is also an awesome ability for the parasites, as long as you make sure to glyph it; my fellow guildie moonkin got his head beaten in because he was knocking back the parasites.

AOE isn’t our strong point at this point in the expansion, so be very careful with excessive use of Hurricane – you don’t want to run out of mana before the fight is over. But the adds need to die, and you need to help, so even if you have to single target the adds or DOT them all up, please do help. If there are any parasites up, DPS them down before you turn on Magmaw.

Omnitron Defense System

The ODS is not really a difficult fight, but it can prove hazardous if you don’t pay attention. I stop putting up DOTs around 10 seconds before the activation timer runs out, because it usually takes a few seconds after that before the shield goes up. If everybody has their DOTs on the boss, and are a bit sluggish with switching targets, you’ll break the shield, and that can cause serious health issues to your raid, and more importantly, to you!

I wouldn’t suggest using mushrooms for Toxitron’s adds – they are generally too spread out for that to be useful. This might change when 4.0.6 comes, and the range of our shrooms gets doubled, though.

Maloriak

This is a very standard nuke fight for the most part. During blue phases, try your best to not stack up. If you get caught in someone else’s freeze, you’ll get frozen yourself. Do help out on freezes – it usually only takes a few moonfires to chip in.

Jsut before Maloriak goes into his green phase, place down three shrooms at the position he is going to jump to. Your tanks will most likely pull the adds on top of him, and if timed well, you can dish out a lot of damage. Do a typhoon, and leave the rest of damaging the adds to the real AOE’s – those who can afford to keep casting it.

Atramedes

I like this fight. It is certainly an original concept. You get a lot of options to spam your moonfire when you are avoiding discs or running away from flame breath. The place where you are in the most danger is in the air phase. If you are in solar eclipse and going towards lunar, you can generally throw a wrath and then move from the barrage – throw another and move again. If you are in lunar and going towards solar, I usually just keep IS up and spam MF.

Chimaeron

On this fight, your sole responsibility is to stack up whenever there is a system failure, and spread out afterwards. Maybe click a lightwell once in a while to help out the healers. Other than that, just nuke away!

Nefarian

Neffy is a tricky fight, because there is so much going on. Whether you are DPS’ing Onyxia or Nefarian, try to stand past the middle, away from Onyxia. That way, when she is turned around for the lightning stuff she does, you won’t get tail swiped. No matter which you are DPS’ing, try to at least keep IS up on the other one. I don’t bother with turning around to cast MF, but IS helps a bit on starsurge procs.

In the transition, try to work out how to get up on the platform as fast as possible, and help out your healers with a barkskin. Any damage you can mitigate in the beginning helps your survivability a lot. Also, keep in mind that solar beam does not interrupt the add, unless you cast it right when the add is actually casting.

For phase 3, just nuke, nuke, nuke. Keep out of fires and use barkskin when Nef does his shock if it’s up. Did I mention you should stay out of fire?

Throne of the Four Winds

Conclave of Wind

I’m going to dub this the new “lol” fight, just like Gunship was.

Al’Akir

I couldn’t really come up with many useful tips for this fight, because anything I say could be applied to every other class as well. If I had to come up with something moonkin specific, be careful with using your starfall in phase 2 – you don’t want the adds to die prematurely.

So that’s it guys, the first set of tips and tricks for moonkin raiding in Cataclysm. If you have some that I have missed, forgotten or am completely ignorant of, be sure to share them below!

Cookies!

Sorry, I’m all out of cookies. But I did want to mention one small thing. For the past few months, my Youtube channel has seen a lot more activity, and if you are wondering what I do when I don’t play World of Warcraft, lurk forums or write on my blog, this is the place you should check out.

I’ve taken on the hobby of doing “Let’s Play”‘s recently. LP’s are basicly a full recording af a game, through and through, with a commentary over it. You’ve seen my Amnesia LP a few months ago, and the archive has since been expanded with completed playthroughs of Portal, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Trine (well, almost) and Heart of Darkness.

Check out my Youtube channel here! Watch a few videos, comment, subscribe – or not, depending on what you like

- QQ

I started Qieth’s Quips on November 3rd last year. If you ever read the introduction post, you’ll remember how I started the blog to sort of have an archive of the past, a place where I could put my thoughts without forgetting them and where they wouldn’t sink away and be forgotten on the internet.

365 days later, and Qieth’s Quips is so much more to me. As it turns out, it has been an awesome way for me to express myself, get rid of some of all that creativity bottled up inside me. It is more than a hobby to do whenever I have spare time, it is the giant basin of words that I fill with.. nah, I can’t really finish that metaphor. I’m loving what the blog does for me, and oddly enough, I always sleep really well after finishing a good post.

When I started QQ, I didn’t really plan on it going anywhere. Well, I hoped that it would get some followers, but I didn’t plan on the thousands upon thousands of visitors coming in each month. It is still, by all standards, a young blog, as there are many more sites out there who are much better known, bloggers that’s been going at it for years with an entourage following in their steps. But I am quite amazed at how well it’s going.

I am a total stats whore, and while I don’t really blog to get followers, I do love seeing how more and more people come through the site. I love it when I see a couple of clicks coming from a random guild forum that I can’t see. I love it when the site tells me that someone googled “Moonkin guide 4.0″ and it comes out on top. I am exstatic whenever someone posts a comment!

And I really like it when the readers – you guys – post comments on the blog. It perks my mind, and a lot of my posts has been inspired by what has been written on the blog. Even more, I love it when you guys tell me your stories and your troubles as a moonkin, how we can work together on fixing the odd thing here and there, and how we can get really great results.

One guy – and I won’t name him here, he knows who he is – wrote me with some guild difficulties. We talked a bit about what one could expect from a guild, what a guild should expect from a member, how to improve and how to perform, and as it turns out, he is now enjoying himself in an awesome guild, doing great. I definately did the least of the work, but it is absolutely awesome to know that once in a while, a post really hit the spot and offered help, or simply perspective.

Over the past 12 months, I have spewed out some 118 posts. Those posts contains no less than 108.729 words, averaging out at 921 words per post. Some are long, some a short, but it usually all comes out to be just right. A year has passed, and hopefully many more will come and go.

Cataclysm is coming in a month, and while I expect november to be a rather slow month for news and topics, things are really going to pick up quickly once Deathwing flies the skies. I have tons of ideas for topics, for guides, for ways I would and could take the blog. Let’s just hope there is time enough to cover it all!

And as for you – yeah, you! – thanks for following the blog. You are awesome, and your awesomeness keep me going, and I hope you will keep enjoying the posts, comment on the stuff, share it with your friends and tell me your stories.

Keep being awesome!

I know, I know, it is difficult to make out just what kind of name it is. People have pointed out to me that there are no words in English that has a Q not followed by a U (quit, quiz, Quasimodo). Even my guildies, who has known me for a long time, and know how to pronounce the name, can get it wrong.

I came up with the name Qieth back when I played Anarchy Online. I somewhat like the sound of the name Keith, so I figured turning the K into a Q was a good idea. Unfortunately, I mixed up the E and the I. It’s not Kieth, after all. The character from Anarchy Online was never one I was very active on, but the name stuck with me ever since.

Back then, my most common screen name was Helios, a name that usually gets taken on any popular service, being the God of the Sun and all. I would be Helios whereever I could, and Qieth was reserved for “secret profiles”, stuff I didn’t want people to find me on. You get the idea. When I ditched Helios, however, I had gotten pretty used to Qieth, and when my druid was made, the choice landed on that.

It’s a tricky name, I get that. If anything, it should have been Qeith. But i can’t change it now. Qeith looks weird to ne. It’s not right. Besides, I am so connected to the name; Its my mains name, part of my blogs title, and it is a name that people, for some reason, remember and google once in a while. I can’t go changing my domain, my blog, my main and a million users across the Internet now. I’m caught. We will simply have to live with it.

My real name is, in fact, Dan, plain and simple. I was toying with the idea of changing my real name to Keith, but that would probably complicate things more. If you ever need to speak my name, when you talk about my blog with your friends (;)), just think of Keith. Not Quieth. Not Qeth. Definitely not Queef!

- QQ